C&RL Spotlight

Wendi Kaspar

As usually occurs, there is quite a variety of topics in the May issue of College & Research Libraries. However, there is interesting thread running through about half of the articles in the issue, speaking to the treatment of media, images, and music. Working on a college campus, it is impossible not to see how embedded media has become in people’s lives, as both consumers and producers. Creating and sharing videos through social media, posting to YouTube channels, and circulation of memes has become an everyday reality. It is a reality that even pervades spoken language in the real world with comments like “You’ve become a meme.”

Certainly academic librarians who work with college students everyday strive to keep up, not just with the technology but with how the technology influences behavior and priorities, particularly of those we serve. At times, I feel like an anthropologist must feel, observing a new culture and trying to discern the hidden meaning. A few years ago, The Guardian published an article asserting “Why YouTube is the new children’s TV . . . and why it matters”1 They asked a number of prickly questions about the implications, which we won’t get into, but the fact is that the Internet is responsible for socializing the younger generations. This may seem like it has no impact on how academic librarians approach students in college, but YouTube has been around since 2005.

So I am going to go out on a limb and say, I am not a big believer in generational identity. It has always seemed like a way to categorize, and, literally, label a group of individuals, potentially resulting in their actual voices being dismissed and erroneous assumptions being made. One such frequently quoted and, at times, ridiculed publication is the Beloit Mindset List.2 That said, it offers an environmental scan about the context, largely mired in population culture, in which many of the entering college students grew up. It is, at once fascinating, and humbling, challenging my own context and assumptions, reminding me that it is important to get to know the individual and underscoring that time marches on.

Universities and academic libraries have made concerted efforts to stay abreast of technological trends, adopting technological tools and incorporating them as part of information fluency.3 More than that, librarians have also provided critical frameworks for media in an effort to education students about rigor, best practice, research ethics, and information standards.

It is encouraging to see the efforts that librarians are making to break out of a text-centric environment and meet students where they are. Almost half of the articles in the May issue examine the media context in terms of student usage, perception, and librarian instruction or interventions.

“Exploring the Research Mindset and Information-Seeking Behaviors of Undergraduate Music Students” by Joe Clark and Jennifer Johnstone examines both student perceptions through surveys and focus groups and student usage and performance through a research task assessment of a population of upper undergraduate students in the School of Music. The results of this study underscored the importance of mixed-methods research and the fact that self-efficacy is not always consistent with efficacy:

• “nearly half of students outright failed to successfully identify an academic article”;
• “Although focus group participants said that they preferred library sources, free nonlibrary affiliated websites remained the most frequently used resources, making up 38% of those cited in rough drafts and a staggering 46% of all sources used in the final papers”; and
• “only 7% of students produced correctly cited bibliographies.”

These results were influenced by mindsets consistent with those of students in other disciplines: “1) a preference for help from friends over instructors and librarians, 2) time constraints influencing their research process, 3) use of search engines as a starting point, 4) being overwhelmed by the number of resources, and problems determining credibility, 5) anxiety with the research process, and 6) overconfidence in their abilities to find and cite information.”

“Buy, Borrow, or Steal? Film Access for Film Studies Students” by Wendy Rodgers examines the results of a survey of students in Film Studies, as well as faculty and librarians, regarding access to films and issues surrounding preferences. The tension between institutional and library processes and preferences of students:

• “The most common method of film access was watching the film during class; 59% of students always or usually did this” and in response to their preferred method, “Watching the film during class was ranked first by the largest number of students (43%).”
• “42% said that they always or usually downloaded films via a common method of movie piracy—using peer-to-peer file sharing software like BitTorrent and sites like Pirate Bay. However, 46% said that they never pirated films for the course through file-sharing.”
• “The Reserve Desk was unpopular—69% never used it” and “Zero students ranked the Reserve Desk as their top preference.”

The article provides suggestions, as one would expect, on what libraries can do to improve access to films for students with an idea to minimizing costs for both students and for libraries, addressing ease of access and convenience. The article also reports disconnects between the perceptions of how copyrighted material should be used versus how it is actually used, and discusses some of the implications for this issue.

“Harder to Find than Nemo: The Elusive Image Citation Standard” by Jennifer Yao Weinraub, with a nod to a major motion picture, addresses another issue related to academic integrity: the treatment of attribution for visual materials in research. This paper examines the guidance that major style handbooks provide with regard to visual materials, including photographs, art, and screenshots, among others. The author chose MLA Handbook, 8th edition, and Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, “as are both widely used in undergraduate and graduate education” and, thus, most likely to inform the visual literacy of students seeking to attribute these kinds of references. The author offers some recommendations and insights that may frame practice in library instruction:

• “The quality of the citation depends on the image source.”
• “A caption is primarily used to identify or describe an image and to give credit; a citation is primarily used to provide the source of the image so that it can be retrieved.”
• “A citation should include as much information as is necessary to locate the image.”
• “Plenty of carefully prepared examples of both captions and citations should be provided.”

Despite these recommendations, the conclusion is that, after a thorough examination of the style guides, they “do not provide specialized guidance on image captioning and citing,” which is necessary for students to “cite visual materials using an appropriate documentation style,” which is an opportunity where “librarians can provide guidance on image captioning and citing to students (and faculty).”

The remaining papers in this issue of C&RL consider information literacy in broader contexts that are no less significant. They focus on practice and perception in ways that contribute to a better understanding of academic librarianship.

“Three Perspectives on Information Literacy in Academia: Talking to Librarians, Faculty, and Students” by Anna Yevelson-Shorsher and Jenny Bronstein is a study of differing perceptions of students, faculty, and librarians identifies the differing expectations and assumptions that influence the effectiveness of each of these roles. “Findings show that students felt that they lacked adequate information literacy skills, did not receive sufficient help from the faculty, and were unaware of the resources and services the library offered. Professors, however, considered such skills important and expected students to obtain them during their studies. The library staff were aware of students’ difficulties in acquiring these skills and have made efforts to develop programs to remedy the situation.” The authors reported perceptions that undermined effective practices and common goals among students, instructors, and librarians:

• Student: “I feel ashamed to ask for help at the reference desk because I’m a senior and I ask the librarian stupid questions.”
• Student: “The teacher didn’t even ask us if we know how to search before giving the assignment. They believe we know everything because we took the introductory tutorial and we should have learned the material in the tutorial.”
• Instructor: “I’m shocked. I tell them: You probably got the training at your other department and they say no. This is surprising and I cannot believe this is so.”
• Instructor: “At the end of the day it [information literacy training] gets pushed aside because we have so much material to teach, so much work to do with them that it comes up only occasionally in class.”
• These are among the interesting assumptions surfaced in this study that may better inform library and information literacy practice. It may also prompt those in academic libraries to surface their own assumptions.

“Experiencing Evidence-Based Library and Information Practice (EBLIP): Academic Librarians’ Perspective” by Lili Luo takes a very applied approach to answer “1) what types of decisions are being supported by evidence; 2) how is evidence used in supporting decision making; and 3) what are the challenges in the EBLIP process.” The results of the study indicate that:

• Librarians tend to use evidence for an “instrumental” purpose – they employed evidence to influence a specific decision, or a solution to a specific problem.”
• To a lesser extent, it was used to “to impact the knowledge, understanding, and attitudes of practitioners and decision-makers.”
• It was also employed “as an instrument of persuasion to support or challenge an existing position” to strengthen an individual’s position or argument.

The author also discusses the challenges to a more effective use of EBLIP in academic libraries, citing “lack of time”; the need for mentoring to understand the important of EBLIP; that availability and accessibility of evidence can be restricted, presenting roadblocks in the process of locating evidence; the influence of the organizational culture, specifically that “without a supportive administration and effective communications within the organization, it is unlikely for EBLIP to succeed”; and the role that personality plays in the adoption of evidence-based practice in libraries.

“Outcomes Assessment in Undergraduate Information Literacy Instruction: A Systematic Review” by Allison Erlinger is a systematic review of the literature on outcomes assessment in Information Literacy Instruction (ILI) for undergraduates. It provides an effective overview of the scholarship examining this topic, identifying themes and trends in the literature, and reviews the reported practice in this context:

• “A somewhat unexpected finding is the lack of consistent terminology within the practical literature on ILI assessment. The definitions employed in this review are generally agreed upon and explicitly delineated in the theoretical and background literature, but are not carefully applied in the case reports of practice.”
• “The theoretical literature as a whole also points to four general recommendations for quality ILI assessment: assessment is an iterative cycle; there is no one-size-fits-all solution; use multiple methods; collaborate whenever possible.”
• “Instruction librarians are performing fairly well on recommendation one—assessment is an iterative cycle—with an overall reporting rate of about half. Application of the principle that every assessment situation is unique (recommendation two) was difficult to glean from the literature. Many authors provide detailed descriptions of their institutions and complete literature reviews on their chosen method(s), but few make an explicit connection between the two that explains how their unique situation led to their selection of a method. Recommendations three and four—use multiple methods and collaborate whenever you can—saw the greatest discrepancies between course-embedded programs and one-shot sessions.”

“The Boolean Is Dead, Long Live the Boolean! Natural Language versus Boolean Searching in Introductory Undergraduate Instruction” by M. Sara Lowe, Bronwen K. Maxson, Sean M. Stone, Willie Miller, Eric Snajdr, and Kathleen Hanna. Boolean has long been a foundational concept for library instruction as well as being acknowledged as an information competency. However, with the ubiquity of Google, natural language searching has largely become the norm for students. This study examines and compares the efficacy of retrieval results of Boolean versus natural language searching within library databases.

• “For the majority of databases included in this study, both Boolean and natural language searching delivered results of highly comparable relevance.”
• “There is variation within databases. In general, Boolean and natural language searches yielded different (unique) results within a given database.”
• “We found little difference in relevance further down the page with the top third of results slightly outperforming the bottom third” and “provides evidence that librarians may not need to be too concerned about first-year students stopping after examining the first-page.”
• Regarding use of the scholarly article limiter in databases, “For teaching librarians, the low overlap percentage in first-year databases ProQuest Central and Academic Search Premier, Boolean search, indicate filters had a greater effect than in other databases tested.”

The authors conclude that “Searching is important, and teaching students to search is important, but these results demonstrate that teaching librarians can transition to focusing on more complex issues related to searching. For example, the thought process behind choosing search terms rather than the intricacies of how to link them together in a database.”

Notes

1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/19/youtube-is-the-new-childrens-tv-heres-why-that-matters.
2. https://www.beloit.edu/mindset/.
3. Yes, I have adopted the term fluency over the traditional use of literacy—a term which has been highly problematic when trying to demonstrate the expertise that librarian can bring to education and lifelong learning since disciplinary faculty tend to perceive “literacy” as somewhat pejorative and reminiscent of remedial learning.